


rest

by aparticularbandit



Series: it's love's illusions i recall; i really don't know love at all [3]
Category: Jane the Virgin (TV)
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-01
Updated: 2019-08-01
Packaged: 2020-07-28 11:07:36
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,005
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20063011
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aparticularbandit/pseuds/aparticularbandit
Summary: after burying rose in her mother's tomb (and after watching luisa watch her die with no effect), luisa and the woman who once was rose meet visiting rose's tomb.





	rest

they catch each other at the crypt, once.

luisa carries nothing in her hands save for a single white rose, and the woman who was once rose solano is already there, fingers tracing the letters that form mia alver’s name, mouth pressed into a thin little line. luisa meets her there, placing the rose in its place to one side of the tomb, a dried white rose already waiting for a new companion, crumpled petals scattered on the tiled ground.

“did you know her?” she asks, and the woman who was once rose is startled, and her blue eyes drop instead of looking up. no mask hides her face, but luisa isn’t really looking at her, only arranging the flowers – the living and the dead – so that they seemed more…something. it gives her hands something to do. she can’t talk as she normally does, not with this other presence.

“i did. briefly.”

if thirteen years can be considered brief in a life that spans forty – more than a fourth of her life given over to a character whose role she is no longer meant to fulfill. her fingers flinch back to her side, rose gold ring still set in its place. she twists it with the pad of her thumb.

then her lips press gently together. she can smell the honey cinnamon scent wafting from the woman next to her truer than the perfume of the roses in their place and she asks, impulsive, trying to cut through the swamp filling her lungs with words, “did she leave you behind?”

“no. i think i left her.”

luisa turns her head briefly and catches the glint of light across the crystal blue of the other woman’s eyes and she thinks she’s not really there. not really. she’s imagined her too many times too concretely to believe that she’s really here right now. the lavender and strawberries is a side effect of the tomb itself, awash in so much of her own spray that anything she smells now is a product of her own actions combined with her ghostly inheritance.

her lips twitch into something akin to a smile and she crosses the distance between them, still not turning toward her. “what was she like? i didn’t know her very long.”

“tempestuous. wild.” the woman who was once rose doesn’t look up. her voice is as hushed as luisa’s had been, speaking to the body for so many months, but here, in this hallowed place, it echoes, reverberates into the noise almost of footfalls. “i think there was a hole in her she didn’t know how to fill, but i don’t think she knew that.”

that deep, yawning, void like an open sore in her mouth or skin rubbed raw by shoes whose sizes were just off, rubbed until there was no more skin just something that glistened like tears in the light.

“she was still wild when i knew her,” luisa admits, “but it felt a little tempered.”

“restrained, maybe. tied down. not tempered.”

luisa reaches over, her fingers gentle as she touches rose’s shoulder, and the woman who once was rose jumps, looks over, the panic of a rabbit caught by a fox etched into her skin. her breathing is as spattered as her heartbeat. luisa doesn’t move her hand.

“you look familiar.”

the woman nods, swallows. “people tell me that.”

“you work around here?”

she nods again. “auto mechanic. it’s an easy job. keeps my hands busy.” her eyes return to her fingers where her now calloused thumb has begun twisting her ring that much more furiously. “a lot of jean and flannel shirts. bandanas to keep the oil and grease out of my hair. doesn’t really work.”

“no.”

luisa is careful when her finger traces the sharp edge of rose’s cheekbone, careful as she feels the other woman shivering beneath her, careful as she thinks that maybe this time, this one is more real. her rose is never afraid of her.

<strike>she isn’t rose.</strike>

“what’s your name?”

the woman who was once rose stumbles. her lips part then close then part again just enough for her to lick her lips. the bricks from the wall feel like they’re closing up her throat. she’s choking on cement. she can’t breathe.

“jane,” she says, finally, and brief, brief, _brief_ her eyes meet luisa’s.

luisa mouths the name and glances up towards the ceiling with a heavy sigh and it’s laughter that quirks her lips. “you can’t be serious.”

“what?” now her brows furrow and she feels the need to defend herself. “my name’s jane. _jane doe._”

luisa’s hands aren’t careful now as she shoves the woman’s arm. this is rose. this is _real_, but her mind hasn’t fully understood the implications of that yet. but her rose – the one she sees – is never this blindingly stupid. “it’s not. please tell me that’s not your name.”

“what other name would i have?” her knuckles are white now, clenched into fists, teeth gritted together. “i’m an unidentified body at the morgue. isn’t that what you want from me?”

luisa’s breath catches. her rose is never this cruel.

jane who was once rose continues as though she cannot stop, and it’s with the earnest rambling that is so emblematic of luisa when she’s caught in something and feels the overwhelming urge to confess like it will make everything better if everyone could just know everything and hate her the way she hates herself.

“to hide me? to put me away somewhere no one will ever find me? to make sure that no one knows you see me because they will leave as soon as you do?”

luisa has no words to defend herself, but she tries anyway. “not all of them.”

“the ones who matter.” the words snap through her lips, bitter as baker’s chocolate.

“they all matter.”

“except for me.”

the corrections – both of them – hang in the air between them. jane who was rose but is no longer swallows once and looks down at the ground because she can feel the molasses feeling thick like what people might call regret consuming her again. “they all matter except for me.”

her words are so quiet they do not echo.

then nothing does.

jane taps her ring against the wall and it makes a clink so loud that the echo breaks the silence longer than their words did because there are no more corrections. “i should go.”

“i don’t want you to go.”

jane shakes her head. “yes, you do. you were glad when i died. i know. you were glad i was gone.” she bunches her hand in a ball and drops it. “everything tastes like sand.”

“gravel.”

“_sand._” her jaw clenches again.

luisa pauses and then steps closer, brow unfurrowed. “why are you here?”

jane opens her mouth then shuts it, shakes her head. “i don’t know.” she kneads her forehead with one hand and the low light glints off the ring on her finger. “it’s nice, sometimes, to remember. it quiets the screaming.” finger taps her head. “here.”

there’s silence again, not the kind where luisa desperately wishes for their broken fan to creak just once, knowing the creak will heal her while at the same time making rose’s rage that much hotter, but the kind after a funeral, staring at a corpse or a casket, umbrellas shielding them from the rain – or the sun, on the days that the world refuses to cry with the mourning.

“can you change your name again?” she asks, finally, and the woman who once was rose looks at her. “i’m…kind of tired of _jane_, to be honest.” one hand brushes her hair behind one ear. “rafael’s wife is jane and petra’s wife is jane and i think if you were jane, too, that would be one too many for one family to hold.” she smiles, a little thing. “or maybe it’s just too much for me. maybe i’m the one who needs to change.”

“you never needed to change.”

the response is immediate. she knows it without thinking, pounding a beat in her chest as steady as her heart.

“then what’s your name?” luisa continues as though the other woman hasn’t started to say anything, one finger raised. “and _don’t_ say it’s _jane doe_ and _don’t_ tell me _i_ can choose because you are not _my_ responsibility _or my fault_.” she steps closer. “_you_ choose your name. something _you_ like.”

the woman swallows again and her eyes can’t meet luisa’s. “can i change it again later?”

“as many times as you like until you find something that fits.”

she smiles, then, and it’s the smile of the rose who once died, tongue peeking out just near her canines. “a rose by any other name—”

“_stop that._”

“make me.”

she says it without thinking, with that smile on her lips, and then the smile freezes as she realizes what she’s said and how easily she falls back into that pattern, and the void comes back, screaming for—

luisa doesn’t kiss her. she steps forward and she takes her hand and she tangles their fingers together. “what’s your name?” she asks instead because the truth is that each name the other has borne has been a new person, a new conglomerate of ideas, and this name would be something else and perhaps something true.

the woman pauses. she considers. she thinks. her lips press together and she says, finally, “vera.”

“vera?” luisa asks, and the weight of the word feels weird on the tip of her tongue, but right.

it hangs in the air between them.

“do you like it?”

“do you?” luisa echoes, refusing to answer the question.

“i don’t know yet,” vera says, and she waits. “it sounds good when you say it.”

“anything sounds good when _i_ say it.”

“true.”

this, too, hangs in the air between them, and vera doesn’t quite look up, focusing instead on her fingers where they mingle with luisa’s. it feels a little like hiding under the waves again, like knowing that whoever she is, the other might not love her. might never have. the void stretches and screams in the middle of her chest and there is nothing to stopper it. _she’s tried._

“well then, vera,” and luisa does not stumble over the name the way the other woman stumbled over jane, and she tugs on the hand in hers, delighted in the feel of the ring still on her finger, “come eat with me. maybe something good will come of it.”

“will it?” vera’s bright blue eyes lift and they seem like crystal – not in their clarity but in their fragility. “or will i burn again only to be burned?” she tugs her lower lip between her teeth and she feels too much to say no but she feels too much to say yes. “i’m so tired.”

luisa’s other hand lifts, and it’s an impulse just as surely as the need to bury rose solano where her mother’s body never lay or to continue to see and speak to a body that never heard her as much as the woman standing in her hands did, and there’s something frail here, a shoot reaching out for the light to grow, and she’s never had a green thumb but she wants to water what might be living here if only to see what it becomes.

“rest, vera. come with me and rest.”

vera nods in her hands and she thinks she’s crying and it is the most obtuse moment because luisa had always been crying and she’d always been wiping away her tears but here she is someone new and broken and it’s luisa who is whole and healed and reaching out with rays that have always felt sunlight and warmth.

“i think I would like that. to rest.”

and so the two of them leave the body behind and the person of rose solano stills in a casket with someone else’s name and they finally make room to breathe.

**Author's Note:**

> Vera, as a name, can mean one of three things (if behindthename.com is to be believed):
> 
> 1) "faith" in Russian  
2) "true" from the Latin verus  
3) "summer" from the Albanian vere
> 
> Each of these feels apt to me.
> 
> (Also Vera is the name of Jayne Cobb's favorite gun in Firefly - the one he tries to trade to Mal for his redhead wife who ends up being someone else. This is also a good reference.)


End file.
